West Coast College Tour

[Anonymous]

Too early. Prior to junior year, stop by colleges when you are on family vacations, maybe for a walk-through or drive-through, just to see what they look like.

As the others said, you have no idea what your child's academic stats will be. It doesn't take much to kick them down a notch from a remotely realistic reach to unreachable. For super-highly-selective schools, one bad semester will do it. (Ultimately, the college list will be divided among reaches, matches and safeties. The schools in your list are reaches for all due to low acceptance rates.)

What you can do in the meantime: spend your own time reading on the internet, to get the lay of the land in college admissions. Understand that Stanford is practically a joke, with a 4% acceptance rate. Learn about what these schools require, not just for stats but the special sauce, the subjective factors beyond stats.

By junior year, you can get an idea of what sort of student you are working with, from grades and any prior standardized test scores. For example, there is no point in taking a 3.5 kid to sit through >two hours of info session + tour at Stanford; that kid's reach might be Santa Clara.

A large part of your job as a parent will be to manage the financial angle. Plan the budget. Run Net Price Calculators on colleges' financial aid websites to see whether they might be affordable. Look at rising cost of attendance and plan ahead for the cost to be greater than what it is this year.

NB, like many public universities, the UCs do not give financial aid to out-of-state students and also charge more. >65k cost of attendance (probably closer to 70). Usually, that is not worthwhile from out of state, because a kid who can afford that and can get accepted may find a better deal at a highly selective private university where there are no overcrowding issues or issues with getting courses and graduating on time. (Notable exception to the CA public affordability situation is Cal Poly, a Cal State university that is cheaper, 43k out of state cost of attendance, with an excellent reputation.)

[Anonymous]

While you are learning the lay of the land, learn what a safety is and is not. Check out this thread from today https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/825440.page

People who think highly-selective schools are safeties don't really have any clue what a "safety" needs to be: kid would want to attend if not admitted elsewhere, kid is certain to be admitted, and the college is certain to be affordable.

The Harvey Mudd example above in this thread is DCUM idiocy at its finest. Admission is nowhere in the ballpark, or even on the same planet, as sufficiently certain for safety territory. (And no, I don't care what their TJ Naviance scattergram told them. Eventually, those end up being the stupid examples of "I didn't get into my safety."

Admission safety: stats >75th percentile for the college (admission stats, i.e. test scores and grades, are published on the college's website) AND acceptance rate >50% plus, as noted elsewhere, no major reliance on subjective factors like demonstrated interest, no yield protection.

Targets/matches will be somewhere in between reaches and safeties. Mudd is an example of reach-for-all-applicants due to the low acceptance rate.

[Anonymous]

Remember that UCs and Cal States are still grappling with impacted majors. Waitlists for required courses can be long resulting in delayed graduation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thanks, please list colleges that are close by...sure I don't want to visit only top schools, this might be for engineering/law

what are we your personal assistants?

run a fricking google search lady, and use google maps if you have to

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thanks, please list colleges that are close by...sure I don't want to visit only top schools, this might be for engineering/law

For law, the undergrad choice isn't so important. That's too far off to be an important factor for choosing undergrad except perhaps for trying not to spend too much on undergrad, to save for law school.

Engineering is a whole other ball of wax - even more reason not to start tours for a freshman. Be patient, parent, the time for tours will come.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I may be jaded because I have a senior, but I would see schools in a range, not just top schools. A lot can happen between freshman and senior year and you are setting him up to feel like a failure.

+1 this! I totally screwed up with my DD...right before 10th grade started, we ended up in a big city and our plans had fallen through, so I attempted to make lemons into lemonade by doing some college tours. Got DD excited about two places and now that we are in 11th, I'm realizing that those schools would be reach or out of reach.

But the fix isn't to not do the tours, the fix is to do a range of schools so if, say, Berkeley drops out, then you still have some others on the list.

Also, btw if your kid isn't enthused, I wouldn't push it or you may end up with showing pearls to swine. Sometimes (maybe most times) it takes seeing motivation on the part of the the peer group to get them motivated.